If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…it [i]is[/i] a duck.
Koffi was compensating for Bosnia , since he was one of the UN Mandarins responsible for security 1993-1994 and possibly played a role in Srebrenica
"Despite the relatively small number of American armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (140,000), the war effort is rapidly shaping up to be the third-most expensive war in United States history.
This conflict has already cost each American at least $850 in military and reconstruction costs since October 2001.
If the war lasts another five years, it will cost nearly $1.4 trillion, calculates Linda Bilmes, who teaches budgeting at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. That’s nearly $4,745 per capita. Her estimate is thorough. She includes not only the military cost but also such things as veterans’ benefits and additional interest on the federal debt."
[quote=“spook”]"Despite the relatively small number of American armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (140,000), the war effort is rapidly shaping up to be the third-most expensive war in United States history.
This conflict has already cost each American at least $850 in military and reconstruction costs since October 2001.
If the war lasts another five years, it will cost nearly $1.4 trillion, calculates Linda Bilmes, who teaches budgeting at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. That’s nearly $4,745 per capita. Her estimate is thorough. She includes not only the military cost but also such things as veterans’ benefits and additional interest on the federal debt."[/quote]
Takes money to make money.
I’m sure that’s how he saw it anyway.[/quote]
Actually, that’s pretty much the way it was- if there ever was a president that lied to the American people to get them into a war it was FDR (and bully for him)- the isolationists were mostly Republican (the ones who had shot down the League of Nations) who didn’t see the Nazis as a threat to America, which was a popular position. In 1940 Roosevelt ran on a policy of keeping America out of the war, and he was certainly lying through his teeth.
Without Hitler first declaring war (which under the terms of the Axis pact he was not obligated to do) it probably would have been difficult to get Congress to declare war on Germany; one war at a time would have been the likely response.
How about weighing the cost of appeasement and submission?
More cost of handing foreign policy over to war-mongering fanatics and zealots:
"In the days to come, as the nation and the people along the Gulf Coast work to cope with the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we will be reminded anew, how important it is to have a federal agency capable of dealing with natural catastrophes of this sort. This is an immense human tragedy, one that will work hardship on millions of people. It is beyond the capabilities of state and local government to deal with. It requires a national response.
Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why, at this moment, the country’s premier agency for dealing with such events – FEMA – is being, in effect, systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security.
Apparently homeland security now consists almost entirely of protection against terrorist acts. How else to explain why the Federal Emergency Management Agency will no longer be responsible for disaster preparedness? Given our country’s long record of natural disasters, how much sense does this make? . . .
Those of us in the business of dealing with emergencies find ourselves with no national leadership and no mentors. We are being forced to fend for ourselves, making do with the “homeland security” mission. Our “all-hazards” approaches have been decimated by the administration’s preoccupation with terrorism."